The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Testimonies 33
and Paraguay), which had lacked prehispanic states and which Iberian
statecraft neglected or avoided.
The earliest Christian missionaries took little interest in "Indian"
belief. It was only in the middle 1560s that an intense native religious
ferment, itself provoked by Spanish depredations, stimulated Spanish
interest in "idolatry." Unintentionally, persecution opened Spanish eyes
to the deepest and least familiar concerns of "Indian history": the nexus
uniting cosmology, landscape, and social organization in a single allexplanatory
model.
In the area of Huamanga (now Ayacucho, Peru), a nativist religious
revival called Taki Unquy (other common spellings: Taki Onqoy, Taqui
Oncoy) demanding return to the cults of the prechristian huacas, evoked
a series of persecutions whose trial records contain a poorly processed but
still invaluable group of testimonies about what natives believed to be
their vital link to a prehispanic past. Taki Unquy has itself been taken
(by Steve Stern) as a revolution in the uses of memory. It required its
converts to hark back to their oldest and most localistic pre-Inka deities,
but at the same time to begin thinking of them as emblems of a new
macro-category — the indigenous — as opposed to the global domain of
the foreign. No texts of actual Taki Unquy sermons have been found.
Father Luis de Olvera, the original instigator of persecution, said its
adherents believed
that God was powerful enough to have created Castile and the Spaniards, and
the crops that grow in Castile, but that the huacas had been powerful enough
to have made this land and the Indians, and the crops and the things that grew
in it, and that the Marques Pizarro, when he entered Caxamarca and conquered
die Indians and subjected this kingdom, had done so because God had at that
time overcome the huacas, but that now, they had all come back to life to do
battle with Him and conquer Him, and that the said huacas no longer embodied
themselves in stones nor in trees nor in springs, as in Inka times, but instead
put themselves into the Indians' bodies and made them speak and then seized
them so they trembled saying that they had die huacas in their bodies, and they
took many of them and painted their faces with a red pigment and put them in
enclosures and the Indians went there to adore them as the idol and huaca
which had gotten into their body. 10
Does South America offer anything comparable with the Mayan Popol
Vuh — a book of non-Christian religious testimony written in an Ameri-
10 El retorno de las huacas. Estudiosy documentos delsiglo XVI, Luis Millones, ed. (Lima, 1990), 178.
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